The MahaloPHP Meetup was a lot of fun. Firstly, Sharon Levy had a great presentation with cool sound effects. That definitely gets your attention…

It’s always good to watch the best techniques presenters use to engage the audience, and not being afraid to play some mood music is definitely one to add to your bag of tricks.

Another cool tip is what I saw Tim Ash do at SES NY a year ago. Bribing. Ask tough questions and offer $10 to the person with the correct answer. Think the audience members were dozing off by the second question? I think NOT!

All I know as a former IBM employee is that they have been in talks before and nothing happened. Plus get ready for huge layoffs if the deal does happen. IBM pSeries boxes have been kicking Sun’s butt for a while now, and the costs of maintaining 2 operating systems, or merging them together will drag on earnings and customers buying for some time. You also risk the loss of many customers to HP if/when the losing operating system is declared.

Considering the previous layoffs, this would be some more bad news for the economy indeed. Maybe not so bad for the MySQL side of the business to have the Big Blue Sun selling it though.

We just had a fun Programmer’s Schmooze this past Sunday with the PHP/MySQL & Semantic Web meetups. These informal meetings are a great chance to network with people from different disciplines.

We had an interesting fellow join us this time who was involved in the adult industry. They handle 80 million unique, active users. Although not everyone wants to, ahem, touch this industry, the scaling and security challenges involved are second to none. I’m not sure that banks get the same number of break in attempts that these sites do.

Upcoming Meetups in Los Angeles
PHP Group:
Coming up on the 22nd of March for the PHP group is a meetup with Sharon Levy. She recently made a presentation in Los Angeles at SCALE. Her topic will be Geek Phun. And the good folks at Mahalo will be hosting.

MySQL Group:
On the 24th of March, Franck Leveneur will present at Yahoo! headquarters in Santa Monica, on MySQL Stored Procedures & Functions. Attendees will automatically be signed up in a raffle to win a free full Navicat license. Their full version is a very nice client. All attendees will receive a 50% discount. Additionally, Zmanda will offer attendees a 10% discount on their ZRM Back up solution. Not to mention free food 🙂

April 16 or 17, we will have Andrew Aksyonoff, the Sphinx Developer speaking. Still working on adding a couple of surprise guests for a special night. Definitely stay tuned for more information in the next few days.

Sphinx searches are very speedy. As I’ve been telling people locally of this meetup, I heard from a couple of companies with some serious traffic who were able to solve longstanding issues with search by switching to Sphinx.

If your company is based in Los Angeles and interested in Sphinx, let me know if you want to meet with Andrew. Hit my gmail account. joedevon at. He should be available to meet on the 16th, 17th, possibly 18th of April.